Water is truly the staff of life, without it, you will die in just a few days. Assume that for whatever reason, your taps won’t work – there is no water coming into your home. What else do you have? Do you have bottled water somewhere? Did you know there is about 50 gallons of water stored in your water heater? There’s also a few gallons in the tank of your toilet! If you have an outside water source – such as a lake, creek or storm drain – do you have a way to filter it? Your first goal with water should be to be able to provide your family with 2 weeks worth of water and a way to continue filtering found water after that. Here is a great place to start learning about water.
Dedicated preppers have been living the prepper life for a long time if not forever. That’s the only plus we may have over the newbies. We come to websites like Gaye’s to keep obtaining knowledge we may have forgotten or didn’t know during our lives. I try to learn something new everyday, and more often than not, I learn from backdoorsurvival and the comments.

The preparation you make for a hurricane, earthquake or other short-term disaster will not keep you alive in the event of widespread social collapse caused by pandemic, failure of the grid or other long-term crises. Government pamphlets and other prepping books tell you how to hold out through an emergency until services are restored. This book teaches you how to survive when nothing returns to normal for weeks, months or even years, including:

Seasoned preppers have storage solutions and creative ways to store food and supplies. Some have root cellars, basements, hidden rooms,storage sheds and even underground bunkers. Those who are just starting out always have questions about storage solutions. There are plenty of people who live in small spaces with little room to store a six-month supply of canned food and bottled water with questions about where to keep that much food. One solution is hiding food storage as pieces of furniture! Here are 10 other storage solutions, suggestions and helpful hints in The Essential Preppers Guide to Storage.
Per #17: Consider 25 pounds of sugar, even if like me, you don’t use it; it can become like money because so many have a sweet tooth for it. Next: at least the same amount of salt. (I buy sea salt for the iodine within and it’s a mineral all animals need in their diets so it too, can be used like $$. Third: black peppercorns, in past history this was used as money everywhere along the spice routes. Why? Because they have a very very long shelf life without losing potency. Then buy a pepper grinder, coffee/spice grinder and/or a mortar and pestle.

Now, there are some dangers to life and limb that we simply can't predict or prevent: the occasional falling piano, the murderous roommate, the untimely stroke. Then there are the risks we take willingly, accepting the inherent and unavoidable trade-offs of our hobbies or jobs: the possibility of being snatched by a giant squid while snorkeling off the coast of California, or the near-certainty of lung fibrosis from toiling in a sugar mine. These are the things we can't or don't want to give up - and that's perfectly fine.

Check out our full review of the best emergency water storage containers and tips on how to store water. We recommend that you have the two weeks of water ready, sitting in containers. Don’t depend on finding and filtering water, or filling your bathtub, for this two-week period. It’s very likely you’ll have access to portable water filters and other water treatment methods because of your bug out bags, but think of those as a bonus backup.
I don’t care if freezing doesn’t kill the bugs. The flour will be used to cook something. It will go into a baked item or be used to coat something for frying. Now I am not saying we shouldn’t take precautions against infestation. What I am saying is there has to be a balance. At what cost (in money, time and effort) is it worth it to make something absolutely safe? Personally, I don’t want to lose focus.
Call ahead to the meat dept.of your store and ask them if they can hold suet or fat for you, what days they ate most likely to have it in inventory, and whether or not it has to be special ordered in the quantity you need. You can also ask for meat trimmings as that is the extra fat that gets cut off the cuts being packaged for the sales floor. There’s often a lot of meat attached to these, and you can get them cheap.
Then, for two hours, Andrew: just tells stories. The time he went after Jesse James’ buried treasure, the time he was held at gunpoint while prospecting for gold, the time an 8-inch centipede fell on him while caving in Japan—each story adorned with cliffhangers and near misses. Andrew: can talk. If he couldn’t, Darryl, a regular attendee, would’ve napped for longer than he did.
But to summarize, let's start with the eponymous threat of nuclear war. A typical ICBM strike is likely to kill most people within a 1 to 10 mile radius of the explosion, with most perishing due to the blast wave and intense heat, not gamma rays. In fact, as witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when one sees a flash of light, ducking behind cover is quite likely to save their life. But more importantly, even an "all out" nuclear exchange with another superpower would leave most of the United States unscathed. It would also not turn the planet into a post-apocalyptic wasteland - at least not any more than the hundreds of nuclear tests already conducted in the twentieth century.

32. Wood Burning Stove – These are great for not only cooking but if you love anywhere where there is snow on the ground 6 months out of the year can make great heaters if the power goes out. The price range can vary substantially depending on the size and quality of the stove. For just outdoor simple cooking checkout the wood burning rocket stove or the dead wood stove. For larger stoves check your grandparents old home 🙂

Sure, the lightbulb needs changing and that office chair is really close, but it would take you only 15 seconds more to bring a more sturdy stool from another room, so don't take chances if you don't have to. Similarly, having someone hold a wobbly ladder for you or securing it with some rope can be a minor hurdle - but it's gonna be much less of a hurdle than dealing with a compound fracture or a dent in your skull.
Good article! A few years ago, a medical condition for someone in my family required that I learn how to cook without high fat dairy, no corn products, no fish, and very low sodium. That means almost no packaged or processed foods, no fast food, almost no snack foods, no packaged flavor packets, no bottled flavorings…well you get the idea. Now I visit Costco a couple times a year for rice, beans, pasta, and meat. I grow almost all the vegetables we eat year round. Our grocery bills have gone way down. And now I actually know how to cook almost anything from scratch ingredients that I always have on hand in bulk. The foods many preppers stock up, are foods I never have in my house so I wouldn’t miss them if they suddenly became unavailable. In hind sight I’ve learned that “stuff” isn’t as important as skills. Trust me, cooking is a skill.
There is A LOT more! But this will get you off the ground on your adventure in getting prepared! We suggest you read about The Path of the Prepper and follow it. Join the APN and become an active member of the community. You can safely ask questions there and very quickly get 30 different opinions on what you’re trying to figure out! You’ll be able to make new friends who are just as interested in your new lifestyle. Find out about your state networks and get active in them. If you’re so inclined, start making a bit of money by writing about your experience! Everyone loves to read articles written by people who are just getting started.
I still hand wash clothes and hang them out to dry..yes, I do have a washer and dryer, but sometimes I just like sun dry clothes. You can set up a clothes line between two trees, in less of an hour. At the lake, we dry clothes over pallets. By the way, speaking of pallets…they are free and you can use them to start up a fire pit or fire place. Get you some. Pallets are good for LOTS of things. Keep that in mind.
Although we are entering the realm of extremely unlikely events, if you genuinely worry about encountering an overturned chemical tanker while driving down the highway, 3M 5512 escape respirators ($16) offer decent short-term protection against many threats. In addition to low price, their major advantage is their small size; you could conceivably have one for every occupant, and just store that gear in the vehicle.

As for the remainder of your money, I suggest splitting it across two largely unrelated financial institutions with different risk profiles - say, a big national bank and a local credit union. As long as the deposits are insured by the government (as they normally are in the US and in Europe, up to a per-account limit), this approach greatly increases the availability of your money, and probably doesn't expose you to any substantially new dangers. Keeping all your savings outside the banking system is an option, too, but it's not necessarily a smart choice. With fiat currencies, this move does not truly insulate you from that many longer-term risks, but adds the very real possibility of losing all your funds to fire or theft.

Why do our dystopian urges emerge at certain moments and not others? Doomsday—as a prophecy, a literary genre, and a business opportunity—is never static; it evolves with our anxieties. The earliest Puritan settlers saw in the awe-inspiring bounty of the American wilderness the prospect of both apocalypse and paradise. When, in May of 1780, sudden darkness settled on New England, farmers perceived it as a cataclysm heralding the return of Christ. (In fact, the darkness was caused by enormous wildfires in Ontario.) D. H. Lawrence diagnosed a specific strain of American dread. “Doom! Doom! Doom!” he wrote in 1923. “Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America.”

For now, he broadcasts Monday through Friday, 9 to 11 a.m., and Finelli invites “instructors”—doctors, dentists, survivalists, a man who carries no identification, an Australian woman who talks about seceding from the government—anyone who has something relevant to preparedness. To Finelli, there’s little that isn’t relevant. He doesn’t sell merchandise or accept donations, as fellow GCN hosts such as Jones do.

In my home county, one of the most rural in Maryland and roughly an hour’s drive outside of Washington, DC, I organized a small meeting of a few people who consider themselves preppers and/or survivalists. The county might be described as 70% conservative and primarily Republican, and 30% liberal and primarily Democrat. Calvert County is a peninsula, 30 miles long and 9 miles wide, no point further than 5 miles from a navigable body of water (the Chesapeake Bay to the east and Patuxent River to the west). It’s mostly farms, parks and deer-filled woodland interspersed with a number of town centers and housing developments.

A supply of nonperishable food and water are a core necessity for every survival kit. Amazon.com offers several varieties of survival kits with emergency food for different situations. For the boat, car, or RV, high caloric density food bars are a compact and affordable way to stay safe. You’ll also find dehydrated meals in large quantities prepackaged compact bins for convenient storage. Waterproof survival kits are perfect for the basement, and contain up to three months of food for four adults.

Great article. Very informative and insightful. I also think learning how to store the right food most especially for leaner times is very important. For me canning is the best way to store food. But make sure that you can your food the right way. It is also a proven fact that canning as a way of storing and preserving different kinds of foods has been done since the 1800’s.

Here's my advice: keep the bulk of your savings in cash, stocks, and other assets you can easily liquidate or put to use today; even if you genuinely worry about the apocalypse, plan to spend no more than 2-4% of your money on essential prepper supplies. Sure, when the zombies come, your financial instruments will almost certainly become worthless; but you better believe that the value of your survival gear will increase 100-fold. Zombies or not, your net worth will be safe. Your delicious, tasty brains - well, that's something to worry about!

That's probably about it... well, all right: this section focused chiefly on the immediate consequences of an outage, but a severe fuel crisis or a long-lasting power grid failure would have profound, cascading effects on the entire economy - probably including out-of-control unemployment, high inflation, product shortages, and more. That said, these are the outcomes we can already prepare for by other means. As for extreme preppers who aspire to long-term energy self-sufficiency, I think it's going to be a difficult feat: even with a solar installation, under constant cycling, the batteries may not last much longer than 5 years. Short of finding a cheap Soviet RTG on eBay, they may simply have to adapt to living without electricity or gas.
They have a huge selection of dehydrated and freeze-dried foods from top brands such as Saratoga Farms, Mountain House, EasyPrep, OvaEasy, Yoders, Datrex, Mainstay, WonderMill, and more. They also have a complete selection of MRE Military Meals. These include self-heating kits with meals like spaghetti, sweet and sour chicken, and garden vegetables in tomato sauce.
Thrive Life Foods. This is my favorite of the freeze dried foods for one simple reason- They sell ingredients, not dishes. With this brand, you can stock up on nimber ten cans of ingredients that you use in favorite dishes. You are not constrained and can prepare the meals that your family is used too eating, cooked from your standard recipes. Unopened cans have at least a 25 year shelf life, and some items are available in 5 gallon buckets. Thrive Life foods can be found online.
These are people who believe a thousand-year-old prophecy is about to come true. People who believe most of their loved ones will be dead within a year. People who are preparing for the possibility of killing their neighbors, who presumably will become feral and desperate. People who just might buy 3D printers and extra fancy new UV handheld water purifiers to help ride out the collapse of civilization, but who are probably more likely to spend $10 on PDF downloads of guides with names like Urban Chicken Farming After the Dollar Collapses. These are people who expect they themselves may only have a year left on this planet.
Be in this for the long haul. Effortlessly losing 1-2 lbs per week while slowly developing better habits is far more meaningful than starving yourself for a month to get immediate but short-lived results. Get an accurate bathroom scale, take daily measurements first thing in the morning, calculate key milestones, and put it all in a spreadsheet to keep yourself honest and motivated. It will probably take 6-9 months to get the outcome you want; daily or weekly weight fluctuations are almost completely meaningless, but you should be seeing a consistent and predictable biweekly drop.
Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
Depends on the size of your family and the time period in which you’ll use it. Once mylar or buckets are open, they are susceptible to many organisms that will make your food inedible. Double to triple serving sizes max. Filling tummies is fairly easy. Doing it safely and palateably is different. Also, your family will need variety to keep harmony. Much of our emotional well-being depends on the gut.
If the fire is around you and you can’t escape, you don’t have many options, says Shane Hobel of the Mountain Scout Survival School. If there’s a pool or a pond nearby, jump in and try to wait it out there. Otherwise, if you have time, dig a trench that’s two to three feet deep and long enough for you to lie in. Soak a blanket in water, wrap it around yourself, and lie down in the trench. It’s risky, but at least you’ll have a chance.
Based on this crude but honest assessment of the general public's affinity for the common bicarbonate, you'd be surprised by how much survivalists are into it (#2 on the list of "things for preppers to hoard"). They must expect some pretty serious hankerings for tasty leavened baked goods, or they have extensive phobias about the funkiness of their nuke survival backup plans.
But there are also the "hold my beer" moments: the unnecessary displays of bravado, overconfidence, or thoughtlessness. We recognize them from cringeworthy yet hilarious Youtube clips of people getting hurt - but we are guilty of the same: we get honked at for carelessly changing lanes, we end up climbing more than a fair share of rickety ladders and office chairs, and every now and then, we all get a bit cavalier with lawnmowers, escalators, ATVs, or other power tools.
But there are also the "hold my beer" moments: the unnecessary displays of bravado, overconfidence, or thoughtlessness. We recognize them from cringeworthy yet hilarious Youtube clips of people getting hurt - but we are guilty of the same: we get honked at for carelessly changing lanes, we end up climbing more than a fair share of rickety ladders and office chairs, and every now and then, we all get a bit cavalier with lawnmowers, escalators, ATVs, or other power tools.

My guess is that most folks believe that the government will step in. Yeah right; just like they did with Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. We all know how well that worked out. The victims of Katrina waited days for aid while thousands were housed in the Superdome without supplies, and the victims of Sandy sat huddled in dark, stinking apartments, then stood in long lines for hours to get their allotted bottle of water and an MRE.

So, here's another unorthodox prescription for building a comprehensive preparedness plan: develop useful and marketable secondary skills. A simple and enjoyable way of doing so is to pick a hobby you can get passionate about - and then work hard, be very honest about your own mistakes and shortcomings, and try to get better at it every week. You shouldn't seek immediate profits, since progressing from a hobby to a paid occupation inevitably takes away some of the fun; but try to gravitate toward pursuits that could conceivably morph into viable career choices within a decade or so. If you have a family, help your spouse and children pursue thoughtful hobbies of their own, too.
Didn’t see this on the list and it could be an entire new thread. But first have a olan of what you will do. Think of all scenarios. What to do if you are not at home with the family. Where do you meet? Do you have a bug out site that everyone who needs to know has a map to it and knows when to bug out. Make sure you have what you need from this llist at the bug out site already. Do not try to haul what you need once you get there. You wil never make… Read more »

Sure, you could go hardcore right from the start and prepare for a long-term disaster from day one but, as I said, there is a learning curve to this, and you want to minimize your mistakes. It’s much better to prepare for the layers I’m about to give you. But before we get into that, let me just give you the heads up on some of the most common mistakes:

Typically, survival kits are designed to help you get through a situation in which help cannot be secured. However, if you equip yourself with a satellite phone you can contact help from anywhere on the planet. In other situations, a pre-paid cell phone or two-way radio (be sure to find out the frequency the local ranger station or emergency responders use) may be all that you need to contact help when you need it most.